I^he Church. 



30$ 



The mother was dressed in coarse French homespun, with 

 a close white cotton nightcap on her head, and the mild 

 est-looking woman I had seen in man}' a day. At a ven- 

 ture I addessed her in French, and it answered well, for 

 she replied in an unintelligible jargon, about one-third of 

 A'hich I understood, which enabled me to make out that 

 she was the wife of a fisherman who lived there. 



"We walked on through the woods toward the 

 church. Who would have expected to find a church on 

 such an island, among such impoverished people ? Yet 

 here it was, a Roman Catholic church. And here we 

 came suddenly on a handsome, youthful, vigorous, black- 

 haired and black-bearded fellow, covered with a long gar- 

 ment as black as a raven, and having a heart as light as 

 a young lark's. He was wending his way to the church, 

 at the sound of a bell, which measured twelve inches by 

 nine in diameter, of about thirty pounds weight, which 

 could nevertheless be heard for a quarter of a mile. It 

 was the festival among the Roman Catholics of La ^^etite 

 Fete de Dieu. The chapel was lighted with candles, and 

 all the old women on the island had trudged from their 

 distant dwellings, staff in hand, backs bent with age, and 

 eyes dimmed by time. They crossed their breasts and 

 knelt before the tawdry images in the church, with so 

 much simplicity and apparent sincerity of heart, that 1 

 could not help exclaiming to myself, ' Well, this is religion 

 after all.' 



"The priest, named Brunet, was from Quebec, and 

 these islands belong to Lower Canada, but are under the 

 jurisdiction of the Bishop of Halifax. He is a shrewd- 

 looking fellow, and, if I do not mistake his character, 

 with a good deal of the devil in him. He told us there 

 were no reptiles on the island ; but we found by our own 

 observations that he was mistaken, as he was also in the 

 representations he made respecting the 'quadrupeds. This 



